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Send Mail with PHP

If you’re a PHP application developer, you might need to send email notifications through your custom PHP applications. With XAMPP, there are three ways to do this: you can use the PEAR Net_SMTP and Mail packages, you can use a simple SMTP client like msmtp, or you can use the third-party PHPMailer class. This guide walks you through these options.

This guide assumes that you have an existing Gmail account, and that you will use Gmail’s SMTP server to transmit email. You can also use your organization or ISP’s mail server, although you’ll need to replace key details, such as the SMTP server name and port, with appropriate values for your environment. Your network administrator or ISP support desk will typically be able to provide this information. The example code provided in this tutorial is illustrative only and should not be used in production environments.

Use PEAR Mail

To configure XAMPP to use the PEAR Mail and Net_SMTP packages for email notifications, follow these steps:

Install the Mail and Net_SMTP PEAR modules:

pear install Net_SMTP Mail

Note that if these packages are already installed in your system you see the messages below when executing that command:

Remember to replace the dummy values shown with your actual Gmail address, password and recipient email address. For this simple test, use your own email address as the recipient address.

Now, browse to the URL http://localhost/sendmail.php to execute the script and send the email message. If all goes well, you should see a success notification in your browser. If you used your own email address for the recipient address, you should also receive the email message.

Use msmtp

To configure XAMPP to use msmtp for email notifications, follow these steps:

Ensure that you are logged in as root. Install the msmtp package.

apt-get install msmtp

Create a new file at /etc/msmtprc and fill it with the following configuration directives:

You can now use PHP’s mail() function to send email from your application. To illustrate how it can be used with your Gmail account, use your text editor to create an example script named sendmail.php in the htdocs/ subdirectory and fill it with the following code. Once done, save your changes.

Remember to replace the dummy values shown with valid email addresses. For this simple test, use your own email address as the recipient address.

Now, browse to the URL http://localhost/sendmail.php to execute the script and send the email message. If all goes well, you should see a success notification in your browser. If you used your own email address for the recipient address, you should also receive the email message.

Use PHPMailer

To configure XAMPP to use PHPMailer for email notifications, follow these steps:

Download PHPMailer from its Github repository using the "Download Zip" button.

Create a directory for your new application within the htdocs/ subdirectory of your XAMPP installation directory. In this tutorial, the application directory is named example/.

Extract the contents of the PHPMailer ZIP archive to the application directory.

You can now use PHPMailer to send email from your application. To illustrate how it can be used with your Gmail account, use your text editor to create an example script named phpmailer.php in the application directory, and fill it with the following code. Once done, save your changes.

Remember to replace the dummy values shown with your actual Gmail address and account password. You should also use a valid sender and recipient address. For this simple test, use your own email address as the recipient address.

Now, browse to the URL http://localhost/example/phpmailer.php. This should execute the script and send the email message. If all goes well, you should see a success notification in your browser. If you used your own email address for the recipient address, you should also receive the email message.